the well, they would shortly be cured. There is still a pin-well in Northumberland, and another in Westmoreland, wherein country girls in passing throw an offering of pins to the resident spirits. So in Ireland, votive rags may yet be seen on trees and hedges that surround sacred wells, whither people travel great distances in order to crawl an uneven number of times in the sun's direction round the water, hoping thereby to propitiate the fairies and to avert sorceries.* St. Gowen's well on the coast of Pembroke is still frequented for the cure of paralysis and other maladies, and there are few counties in England where the dedication of curative wells to Christian saints does not betray the attempt to hallow and hide a heathen practice under a Christian name. In Northamptonshire alone we find St. Lawrence's at Peterborough, St. John's at Boughton, St. Rumbald's at Brackley, St. Loy's at Weedon-Loys, St. Dennis' at Naseby, St. Mary's at Hardwick, and St. Thomas' at Northampton. So in Normandy, people still resort from all parts of the province, on the eve of June 1, to the fountain of St. Clotilde, near Andelys, and there are other French wells of no inferior celebrity. And just as English peasants propitiate bad water-spirits by presents of pins, so do the Bretons by slices of bread and butter; and the Livonians, before starting on a voyage, calm the sea-mother by a libation of brandy. But water, in addition to its dangerous and curative properties, is supposed to contain prophetic ones as well. Thus the Castalian fountain in Greece was prophetic, and as the Laconians, by cakes thrown into a pool sacred to Juno, used to augur good or bad to themselves according as the cakes sank or floated, so do our Cornish countrymen by dropping pins or pebbles into wells read futurity in the signs of the bubbles.

The belief in evil spirits, which underlies many of the foregoing superstitions, as it is one of the earliest beliefs of the human mind, and long prior to any idea of beneficent powers, so it is one of the most persistent. The worship of water, fire, and other natural objects probably arose from a dread of spirits thought to be resident within them, whom it was as well to cajole by gifts and prayers. Earth and air, like fire and water, were peopled respectively with unseen demons, which survive in still current traditions of the Gabriel Hounds, the Seven Whistlers, fairies, elves, and all their tribe. Our countrymen in Cornwall, if the breeze fail whilst they are winnowing, whistle to the Spriggian, or airspirits, to bring it back; and the Esthonians on the Gulf of Finland do, or did, precisely the same. In Northamptonshire, till lately, women used to sweep the hearth before they went to bed, and leave vessels of water for the ablutions of the fairies or spirits of the earth, just as in Siberia food is placed daily in the cellar for the benefit of the Domavoi or house spirits.

Sir W. Betham, Gael and Cimbri. 1834. "The branches of a tree near the Stone of Fire Temple in the Persian province of Fars were found thickly hung with rags, and the same offerings are common on bushes round sacred wells in the Dekkan of India and Ceylon." (Forbes Leslie, Early Races of Scotland, vol. i. p. 163.)

+ Schiefner, Introduction to Sjögren's Livische Grammatik. St. Petersburgh, 1861.

In Scotland green patches may still be seen on field or moor left uncultivated as "the gudeman's croft," by which it has been hoped to buy the goodwill of the otherwise evil-disposed Devil or earth-spirit; and it is doubtless from a similar fear of showing neglect or disrespect that Esthonian peasants dislike parting with any earth from their fields, and in drinking beer or eating bread recognise the existence and wants of the earth-spirit by letting some drops of the one and some crumbs of the other find their way to the floor.*

Hence, if the surmise be correct that worship of natural objects in its ultimate analysis is due to a desire to propitiate the powers supposed to animate them, the whole mass of folk-lore which has been shown to be connected with the worship of trees, or animals, or fire, or water, is traceable primarily to ignorant fear. But so is much more of it besides. The dread of witches, or of persons who have allied themselves with invisible beings, springs from the same source, and from the belief in witches again flows a volume of absurd superstitions, such, for instance, as the universal custom of turning homewards on meeting an old woman early in the morning, or the bad luck attributed to seeing a hare, a cat, a magpie, or any other form into which it is easy for a witch to transform herself. And from such ideas, again, flow the supposed antidotes to sorcery; the efficacy, for example, of salt, so generally among the first presents given to babies, or carried in the pocket or shoe, by persons on their way to be married, as is the case in Brittany and North Germany.

But the belief in evil spirits affords the best explanation for a set of customs no less curious than disagreeable and ridiculous. We allude to the world-wide superstitions connected with spitting and sneezing. Many Englishmen spit if they meet a white horse, a squinting man, or a single magpie, or if, inadvertently, they step under a ladder, or wash their hands in the same basin with a friend. In Lancashire, boys spit over their fingers before beginning to fight; travellers on leaving home spit on a stone and throw it away; market people spit on the first money they receive in the day. Swedish peasants spit thrice if they cross water after dark, and even the aesthetic Athenian used to spit if he met a madman. So the savage New Zealand priest spits on the two sticks, which, according as one of them falls uppermost, are to foreshow the result of a coming battle. Indeed, this unpleasant habit seems an universal charm for bringing good luck or averting bad, but for what conceivable reason than that the mouth was once regarded as the portal by which evil spirits got into a man and by which alone they could be forced to make their exit? The Messalians used to make spitting and nose-blowing a part of their religion, for they hoped thereby to free themselves from the demons with which they fancied the air to be full. This single case contains, probably, the key to all the others.

* The instances of Esthonian superstitions are taken from Grimm's collection in the Deutsche Mythologie. Their date is 1788. The same interest attaches to them from an archæological point of view, whether they exist still or have become extinct.

But why should sneezing be so generally regarded as a bad omen, and one to be averted if possible by felicitations and blessings? One explanation is, that as it was the sign of returning convalescence during the plague at Athens, congratulations were offered when the crisis was past; another, that during a great plague which raged in Germany in the 6th century, and began its fatal course with a fit of sneezing, it was usual to exclaim, "May God help you now," as soon as the sad death-signal was heard.* But the custom is of far wider extent and older lineage than such explanations imply; and the only possible hypothesis is one that adapts itself to all races and all times. In New Zealand, a mother repeats a charm when her child sneezes, lest any evil result in consequence,† and English nurses do just the same. In the Netherlands a sneeze gives a witch power over a person, unless some one invoke a blessing from heaven, and in these facts probably lies the real explanation. For, taking into account that every bodily derangement is regarded by savages as possession by evil spirits, and that sneezing is always the precursor of those temporary bodily derangements, often very severe, which we know as "colds," may it not be that in those early times, when to precede is the same as to cause, a sneezing fit was set down as the sign or cause of such an approaching possession, and charms employed to counteract its effects? If a cold was ever held to be a bewitchment, we can understand the use of charms and blessings at the earliest stage of the premonitory symptoms. As an involuntary act, a sneeze would, like all other natural phenomena, be a portent significant of, and entailing, a series of consequences; and in course of time, as men improved in observation and distinctions, it would grow to be even auspicious under certain circumstances. Thus in our own country it is a good sign on some days of the week, but a bad one on others; and in Scotland an infant is under fairy spells until it sneezes, a belief apparently connected with the absurd idea of the incapacity of idiots to sneeze. In Greece, also, the distinctions drawn about it raised sneezing to an art; for whilst it was unlucky in the afternoon, or when food was being cleared away, or if it occurred three times, or more than four, or on the left-hand side; if it occurred among persons in deliberation, or two or four times, or in the morning, or on the right-hand side, it was accounted a lucky omen. We read that Themistocles, by a judicious sneeze on his righthand side, persuaded his soldiers to fight, and Xenophon, by a similar act in the middle of a speech, was elected general. And on another occasion a sneeze from a linesman just before a battle was considered so ominous that public prayers were deemed necessary in consequence.

Such instances of actual Folk-Lore as have been collected, many of them now mere meaningless survivals, seem to us only to be accounted for on the ground that they have descended to us either from the earliest inhabitants of Western Europe, or from times when our Aryan progenitors

Hahn, Geschichte von Gera, vol. i. p. 287.

+ Shortland, Traditions, &c., of New Zealanders. 1856, p. 131.

were perhaps not unlike modern Tasmanians. We have tried to establish the existence, not only in England but throughout Europe, of phases of thought and modes of worship closely similar to those still found among actual savages. There is no nation that we know in the present or read of in the past so cultivated as not to retain many spots from the dark ages of its infancy and ignorance; but these, absurd as they may seem, hold the rank and claim the interest of prehistoric antiquities.

But it may be urged that no necessary antiquity can be asserted of traditions simply on account of the wide area they range over, and instances may be cited of Christian superstitions no less widely extended than many we have mentioned. The belief, for instance, that about midnight on Christmas Eve, cattle rise on their knees to salute the Nativity, is found with slight modifications in England, Brittany, the Netherlands, and Denmark. In Cornwall a strong prejudice exists against burying on the north side of a church, and precisely the same feeling is found in Esthonia, for the reason there given that at the end of the world all churches will fall on that side. So, too, the custom of opening all doors and windows at a death, to give free outlet to the departing soul, prevails no less in the south of Spain than in England or in parts of Germany.

To this objection there are two answers: first, that the capacity of superstitions to spread widely and rapidly is by no means denied; secondly, that many Christian traditions are really heathen, though their origin and meaning may now be lost. For the policy of the Church towards paganism, though at times one of radical opposition, was generally one better calculated for success. It learned to prefer gradual triumphs to speedy conquests, aware that the former were more likely to last, and was pleased to satisfy its conscience and hide its impotence under connivance and compromise. It assimilated beliefs which it could not destroy, and glossed over what it could not erase, substituting simply its saints and angels for the gods and spirits of older cults. On Monte Casino, near Rome, there existed down to the sixth century a temple sacred to Apollo, till St. Benedict came and, like another Josiah, broke the idols and overthrew the altar and burned the grove, but set up a temple to St. Martin in its stead. And this case is typical of the way in which obstinate heathen rites were diverted and customs consecrated. Some instances may well be added to those already incidentally alluded to, since they serve to explain how so many relics of heathenism have resisted centuries of Christian teaching. The Scandinavian water-spirit, Nikur, inhabitant of lakes and rivers and raiser of storms, whose favour could only be won by sacrifices, became in the middle ages St. Nicholas, the patron of sailors and sole refuge in danger; and near St. Nicholas' church at Liverpool there stood a statue of the Christian saint, to whom sailors used to present a peace-offering when they went to sea, and a wave-offering when they returned. So it was with sacred trees and flowers and waters. Their sanctity was transferred, not destroyed. St. Boniface, with the

wood of the oak he so miraculously felled, raised an oratory to St. Peter, to whom were henceforth paid the honours of Thor. Nobody ventured the more to touch the famous oak at Kenmare when blown down by a storm, because it had been handed over to the protection of St. Columba, nor did a fragment of St. Colman's oak held in the mouth the less avert death by hanging because it had been sanctified by the name of a saint. The Breton princes, before they entered the church at Vretou, offered prayers under a yew outside which was said to have sprung from St. Martin's staff, and to have been so replete with holiness that the very birds of the air left its berries untouched. The great goddess Freja could only be banished from men's thoughts by transferring what had been sacred to her to the Virgin Mary; and the names of such common plants as Lady's Grass, Lady's Smock, Lady's Slipper, Lady's Mantle, and others, attest the wrong done to the northern goddess. Bits of seaweed called Lady's Trees to this day decorate many a Cornish chimney-piece, and protect the house from fire and other evils. The Ladybird was once Freja's bird, and Orion's belt, which in Sweden is still called Freja's spindle, in Zealand now belongs to her successor Mary. In the same way Christmas has supplanted the old Yule festival, and the Yule log still testifies to the rites of fire-worship once connected with the season. So we now keep Easter at the time when our pagan forefathers used to sacrifice to the goddess Eostre, and hot cross-buns are probably the descendants of cakes once eaten in her honour, on which the mark of Christianity has taken the place of some heathen sign.

Such then is the evidence which Comparative Folk-Lore affords in support of the theory that the people from whom we inherit our popular traditions were once as miserable and savage as those we now place in the lowest scale of the human family. The evidence that the nations now highest in culture were once in the position of those now the lowest is ever increasing, and the study of Folk-Lore corroborates the conclusions long since arrived at by archæological science. For, just as stone monuments, flint knives, lake-piles, or shell-mounds point to a time when Europeans resembled races where such things are still part of actual life, so do the traces in our social organism of fetishism, totemism, and other low forms of thought, connect our past with people where such forms of thought are still predominant. The analogies with barbarism which still flourish in civilised communities seem only explicable on the theory of a slow and more or less uniform metamorphosis to higher types and modes of life, and we are forced to believe that before long it will appear a law of development, as firmly established on the inconceivability of the contrary, that civilisation should emerge from barbarism, as that butterflies should first be caterpillars, or that ignorance should precede knowledge. It is in this way that superstition itself may be turned to the service of science.

J. A. FARRER.